May 7, 2026
Front matter that catches your typos
By Phil Scott
Type tite: instead of title: and YAML accepts it without complaint — a valid
key, but not one Pennington reads. The page builds, the title falls back to a
default, and you notice when the page looks wrong. Pennington now flags that
earlier.
Unknown keys get flagged
Every front-matter parse pre-scans for keys it doesn't recognize. A misspelled or stray key raises a diagnostic with the key, the file, and the line:
Unknown front-matter key 'tite' in content/guide/setup.md:3
Under serve that's a warning in the dev overlay. Under build, strict mode is
on by default and the warning becomes a build failure — dev mode and build
mode stay permissive while you write and
strict before you ship, so a typo can't reach a published site. The keys
Pennington recognizes are listed in the front matter
reference.
Code fences, too
The same check reaches into code blocks. Tag a fence with a language Pennington
can't highlight — a typo like cshrap, or something genuinely unsupported — and
it emits an Info diagnostic. It fires once per unknown language, so a site with
fifty cshrap fences gives you one note, not fifty.